Lydia Davis Short Stories

1. Lydia Davis is an American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages.
3. Born: July 15, 1947 (age 67),Northampton, MA
4. Spouse: Paul Auster (m. 1974–1978)
5. Children: Daniel Auster, Theo Cote
6. Awards: Man Booker International Prize, MacArthur Fellowship

1.      The collected short stories of Lydia Davis, which I have on my Kindle, revealed to me an author of extraordinary gifts. I have never read such a varied selection of styles, length of stories (some very long, some a line or two), points of view, first person narrators, quirky-ness of language--describing her breadth of story-telling ability could go on and on.
2.      How I had lived in the USA for so long and never heard of her is a mystery.
3.      I wish I could cut and paste, from The Daily Telegraph, the whole of Colm Toibin's review of her collected short stories, but the following will give you a taste:
4. 
   

           "Her vision of suburban America has all the unsettled surrealism of a Gregory Crewdson photograph. Like John Cheever, she can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. Her tone, at times, can take its haughty bearings from French novelists such as Nathalie Sarraute, and certainly from Beckett’s prose, or from Proust, whose work she has translated.

           Having read all 733 pages of her book in a few days, I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind. The ability of her protagonists to self-dramatise is tempered by their wit. Davis’s sly, spiky system of imagining is opened out by tenderness, by sheer pain, by hilarity, often in the same paragraph. Her risky hit and miss system of storytelling is enriched by discipline and by the most surprising twists and turns; her stories display a sensibility of the rarest sort, allowing itself full exposure."

Corrigendum and Addendum

Corrigendum: I mis-spelt the surname of Vaclav Havel, putting in two 'l's at the end of his name. A mistake that derives from my one-time primary care doctor, who was a two 'l' Havell.

Addendum: I wanted to track down the Henry James quotation from the Preface to "What Maisie Knew" that was mentioned by Richard Ford. Google has everything and I found the Preface, which is very long and intricate and sets out James's development of his plot.

The reference by Richard Ford was in answer to a questioner who said he had been laughing out loud at many passages in the Ford book, and yet he felt there was always a more serious side to the humour. Then Ford mentioned the James quotation. I don't think from memory he got it quite right. But it was certainly on the following lines--which are Henry James:

"No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong."

I was struck by the use of 'bale,' and prompted to go into my OED--something I always enjoy doing, although dictionaries in print are--sadly--dying a death.

Two meanings for the same word, "bale." The first, described as archaic and poetic, is "Evil, especially as an active and destructive force, a malign influence, woe, harm, injury, physical torment, pain, misery." That just about covers the waterfront.

But there is a second meaning, not qualified by "archaic and poetic:" "A great consuming fire, a funeral pyre."

"...A Half-Formed Thing

      I have finished it.

     Did I enjoy it? I do not think 'enjoy' came into it--I was moved, horrified, amazed at the language, put off by the language, skeptical of things that happened, full of admiration for the author.
But, I would bet she will never write another book like this.
I will bet no-one will ever try to imitate the language of this book.
It's an amazing tour de force--but, dare I say, perhaps too long a tour with a bit too much force.
It's not just a stream of consciousness--it's a mighty torrent of consciousness, and a torrent rushing down over rocks, breaking up, gushing here and there, falling in waterfalls, overflowing the banks--flooding.

     Here is one of the more extreme passages:

“Don’t I come all mouth of blood of choking of he there bitch there bithc there there stranlge me strangle how you like it how you think it is fun grouged breth sacld my lungs til I. Puk blodd over me frum. In the next but. Let me air. Soon I’n dead I’m sre. Loose. Ver the aIrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breath. And I breath my. I make. You like those feelings do you now. Thanks to your uncle for that like the best fuck I ever had. HoCk SPIT me. Kicks. uPshes me over. With his brown boot foot. WitK the soLe of it on my stomik. Ver. Coughing my. Y hard. He. Into the ditch roll in gully to the side. Roll. I roll. For it. He. Turn on the. I. Hear his zip. Thanks for fuck you thanks for that I hear his walking crunching. Foot foot. Go. Him Away.”

     Admittedly, the use of the capitals and misplaced letters is only resorted to in this passage, and perhaps a couple of others. But without those curious juxtapositions, this excerpt is similar to many, many others, some of which run on for agonizing pages. By contrast, there are many almost lyrical passages that are very moving. The ending is pure poetry.

     So I cannot say--run out and buy it, or Kindle it. Get it from a library and give it a try. I expect you'll read it, though some major portions of the subject matter might turn you off. Grit your teeth and continue...

"A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" by Eimear McBride

     This book was thoroughly recommended by James Wood in The New Yorker, and I have usually found that he can be relied on as a critic. But this is a difficult book, and I would--so far--hesitate to push people to read it. I am only about a third into it, and my final view will depend on how it develops.
   
        Just to give an idea of the extreme way in which language is used, here an excerpt:

     “There now a girleen isn’t she great. Bawling. Oh Ho. Now you’re safe. But I saw less with these flesh eyes. Outside almost without sight. She, asking after and I’m all fine. Hand on my head. Her hand on my back. Dividing from the sweet of mother flesh that could not take me in again. I curled there learning limb from limb. Curdled under hot lamps. Sorrow lapped. I’m so glad your brother’s lived. That he’ll see you. It’ll all be. But. Something’s coming. Wiping off my begans. Wiping all my every time. I struggle up to. I struggle from. The smell of milk now. Going dim. Going blank. Going white.”

     That comes at the end of the opening, short chapter, which a careful read shows that the first person narrator is speaking of her birth. And the preceding text, which has to be read very slowly, explains that her older brother had to have a brain operation while her mother was pregnant. And this older brother plays an important role in the novel and is often addressed directly by the narrator.

     As the book progresses, and the narrator gets older, the text gets a bit less dense and the events described become clearer. Here is an example from later on:

     

      "Goodfornothinglumpofshitgodforgiveyou. Ours got for her wedding a glare though he paid. He, at least, knew how to behave. Though a man like our father could be nothing to him. Not to lick his boots. Not to be his dog. Of course he wasn’t even surprised when he ran off. Walked she said. I knew it would happen for what could you expect? Psychiatrist indeed and what rubbish is that? Poking in vegetables’ heads for a living or calling good people mad. He knew the type. Didn’t even guess his son was sick. Busy thinking he was so great, no doubt. What kind of father is that you tell me? She didn’t, or he wasn’t a brain”

     The narrator's father has left the mother, son, and daughter.

      This should give you the flavour of the language you will face if you read the book. I do not want to mention some of the staggeringly good passages, as that would likely spoil some of the effects if you do read the book.

      But I need to finish it first before I make up my mind about it.

     

      If anyone's read it, please write a comment.

Pavlov's Dog(s)

This from an article about Pavlov in this week's New Yorker.

     Apparently the gastric fluids of a dog became a popular treatment for dyspepsia in Russia and elsewhere, and Pavlov set up a gastric juice factory....

 "An assistant was hired and paid thirty rubles a month to oversee the facility ...five large young dogs, weighing sixty to seventy pounds and selected for their voracious appetites, stood on a long table harnessed to the wooden crossbeam directly above their heads. Each was equipped with an esophagotomy and fistula from which a tube led to the collection vessel. Each ‘factory dog’ faced a short wooden stand tilted to display a large bowl of minced meat. By 1904, the venture was selling more than three thousand flagons of gastric juice annually, and the profits helped increase the lab budget by about seventy per cent."

No comment.

Politics and Prose: Our Local Bookstore

We have had an excellent series of author events at our local bookstore.
     Jane Smiley talking about her new book, the first part of a new trilogy about an Iowa farm family that will take them up to--I think she said--2020, so it will involve some forecasting as to how this country will develop, and at the moment one can only be deeply pessimistic about that prospect. Seeing her reminded me to get "Thirteen Ways of looking at the Novel." I came home and got it for $0.99 plus $3 postage from Abebooks.
     Boris Johnson, talking about his Churchill book (the place was packed). He is clearly intellectually brilliant, and in an era of wishy washy personalities in British politics--he stands out as being at least A CHARACTER. If you had to choose to spend a day with Cameron, Milliband, Clegg, Osborne, or Johnson--you would have to choose Johnson. He captivated his American audience, who are not used to such articulate flows of language.
      Richard Ford, at seventy, was wry and funny--reading from his new book, which consists of four stories with his famous sportswriter, Frank Bascombe, getting old and facing up to that fact. Some of the passages he read were hilarious. And he was excellent in the Q and A.  One mot: "don't let an author tell you writing is hard work--it isn't. It's just something anyone can do when they have nothing else to do." He also quoted Henry James in the introduction to "What Maisie Knew," But so far I have not been able to find the quote--it was something about the task of the novelist and why we read novels.
     And lastly--I have just come back (Joan is out with 'the girls')--a discussion between Madeleine Albright and the author of a new biography of Vaclav Havell. The author was Havell's friend and press secretary for most of Havell's life: his name, Michael Zantovsky, and he is presently the Czech ambassador to the UK--or as they insisted in his introduction--to The Court of St. James. The DC Public Library has the book and I have put a hold on on it. A book I shall probably dip into rather than read from cover to cover.

"Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder

     A few weeks ago we went to seminar at Georgetown University School of International Studies to hear a lecture on the Ukraine situation by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. When he was introduced, mention was made of his book "Bloodlands," which has apparently been translated into 15 languages. I got it from the DC Library, and immediately realized that I was not going to read it from cover to cover. I dipped around in it, and found it consists of an enormously detailed documentation, mostly drawn from first-hand sources, of the slaughter that took place in Eastern Europe--not people killed by military action but in other ways. His summary in the final chapter is as follows:

"Between them, the Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered more than fourteen million people in the bloodlands. The killing began with a political famine that Stalin directed at Soviet Ukraine, which claimed more than three million lives. It continued with Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, in which some seven hundred thousand people were shot, most of them peasants or members of national minorities. The Soviets and the Germans then cooperated in the destruction of Poland and of its educated classes, killing some two hundred thousand people between 1939 and 1941. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans starved the Soviet prisoners of war and the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, taking the lives of more than four million people. In the occupied Soviet Union, occupied Poland, and the occupied Baltic States, the Germans shot and gassed 5.4 million Jews. The Germans and the Soviets provoked one another to ever greater crimes, as in the partisan wars for Belarus and Warsaw, where the Germans killed about half a million civilians.”

Shostakovich

     Recently we heard a concert in which Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony was played, and the program notes related the story of Stalin getting up and leaving before the end of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which plunged Shostakovich into deepest fear, and the Fifth was supposed to be written to show he was reacting to justified criticism.
     This reminded me of two fictional accounts I had read of Shostakovich in terror of the knock on the door.
     First, in Richard Powers' "Orfeo," which has been described as a history of twentieth century music. "Orfeo" also includes an interesting description of the genesis of The Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen, which was written and first performed in a German prison camp.
     Second in "Europe Central" by William T Vollmann, which won the National Book Award in the US in 20005. Let me cut and paste from somewhere or other (thank Google)to introduce you to this extraordinary book:

''Europe Central'' gives us 37 stories, five of them more than 50 pages long, to represent Central European fanaticism and to recover little-known acts of conscientious resistance to Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. What sets ''Europe Central'' apart from Vollmann's other large-scale historical productions is its strong narrative lines. The pieces are dated and arranged chronologically to give the book a plot that arcs from prewar political machinations to Germany's surge east to Russia's counteroffensive, and that ends with cold war politics in divided Berlin.

Stories about Shostakovich and his intimates or rivals -- his lover Elena Konstantinovskaya; her husband, Roman Karmen; the poet Anna Akhmatova -- recur often enough to make the collection a suspenseful near novel about the composer and his times. Shostakovich is so fascinating -- in his musical ideas, his often failed defenses against Stalinist demands, his nearly suicidal wit and his bumbling speech -- that you may be tempted to skip the intervening stories to see how his treacherous life turns out. Vollmann's pell-mell telling of Shostakovich's last years -- 1943 to 1975 -- in the almost 110-page story called ''Opus 110'' is a tour de force. As the composer jams the horrible sounds of his life into his summary opus, Vollmann compacts the themes and motifs of his book into its emotional climax.

"Europe Central" is an amazing achievement...but over 800 pages....so I cannot just say, get it and read it...

I-Pad, I-phone, I-Books. Saki.

     An icon recently appeared on my I-pad called I-Books. After clicking on it, I discovered that, like Amazon and Kindle, Apple sold books that could be bought and downloaded on-line, and it also offered a large number of free books. I downloaded, free, to my I-pad "War and Peace" and "The Unbearable Bassington" by Saki--H. H. Munro.
   
     With W and Peace, I am taking a leisurely stroll, savouring a chapter or two at breakfast, and I think it's going to take me over a year.

     And I found out yesterday, waiting in my car for Joan, that these books were also synched to my I-Phone. So I can read something rather than playing Hangman ofr Paper Toss.
   
      I have read The Unbearable Bassington, and one can only admire the wit and elegance of H.H. Munro. He writes in long and carefully constructed sentences. Most of the characters that appear are  the subject of withering criticism--of their voices, appearance, morals, ethics, hypocrisy, et al. A group of ladies playing bridge engage in sardonic conversation, each attempting in subtle and catty ways to denigrate their companions,. There is not much of plot. Young Bassington is not unbearable--indeed he is one of the more likable characters. His mother, Francesca, wants him to marry a rich woman so that she can keep her house in Moon Street and all her cherished  possessions, particularly an old master painting. Young Bassington loses the rich young lady to a young MP, and he has to be shipped off to a job in West Africa, where he dies. Francesca learns of his death, and at the same time is told that her cherished old master is a copy. End of book.
     I was prompted to do a bit of Googling. First to get his dates--he was shot in 1916 on the Western Front. His last words were apparently, "Put that bloody cigarette out." He had enlisted although he was over 40, and he had refused a commission, preferring to serve as a private soldier.
     As I read Bassington, I thought I detected some subtle gay references, and I Googled--"was H. H. Munro gay?" Plenty of answers came up, including this

"Munro was homosexual, but...that side of Munro's life had to be kept secret. His pen name, however, was a strong hint: Saki was a term for a cup-bearer, a beautiful boy, an object of male desire. Munro kept a houseboy (hint) throughout most of his life, and many of his stories included coded references to homosexuality. In a series of stories, the suspiciously close characters, dandies Reginald and Clovis, engage in dialogue and activity that allow the more astute reader to read between the lines.

According to biographer A.J. Langguth, regarding Saki’s same-sex activity: “(His) average in his best months was an encounter every second day; when he was busy or traveling, every third day.” Maybe that’s why his stories were so short." (Not sure I see the logic of that)

     There is dispute whether Saki was anti-Semitic (that's another Google exercise that yields interesting results). But in Bassington there are several snide anti-Semitic comments, including the following, describing the crowd in an Austrian restaurant:

"Also in evidence at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic (sic) tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay."

     I went back to my copy of Saki's Complete Stories, which I see was a present from my elder  Sister Anne on my 16th Birthday. Some of them are wonderful--Sredni Vashtar, Tobermory, The Seven Cream Jugs, The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope. Clovis provides words for a  song by Septimus, who is editor of Cathedral Monthly but secretly writes silly lyrics and tunes that praise women; but he is stumped with rhymes for Florrie. Clovis provides a new approach--denigrate Florrie. And so we have:

"How you bore me Florrie

With those eyes of vacant blue;

You'll be very sorry, Florrie,

If I marry you.

Though I'm easy-goin', Florrie

This I swear is true,

 I'll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,

If I marry you."

     And Clovis suggests to Septimus that to keep his secret secret, Septimus should use the royalties to take him, Clovis, on an all-expenses-paid holiday in the Adriatic.

'The Children Act' by Ian McEwen

     Like all McEwan's novels, this is a fascinating and accomplished work. Its protagonist is Fiona Maye, a judge in the Family Division of the UK's High Court. The core of the story--and McEwan is very good at telling a story--is a case she has to decide about a seventeen year old boy whose faith as a Jehovah's Witness leads him to refuse to have the blood transfusion that will save him from death--he is suffering from leukemia. And Fiona is faced with this problematical case just after her husband has announced he wants to have an affair with a much younger woman.


      It's a third person narration, but it is all narrated from inside Fiona's mind, what she thinks, and what she observes. Tessa Hadley (no mean writer herself) comments, "Usually a realist novelist – and the book does in its beginnings feel like realism, more or less – would sample just enough fragments of that legal detail to flavour the narrative with authenticity, while reserving the core of his attention for the character's emotional life and relationships. The novel form is notoriously better suited to conveying the subjective flow of experience, less good at ideas or abstract argument."

     She then goes on to pointy out how well McEwan does both--the realism and the emotional life. Fiona's thinking leads to expositions of some particularly interesting and morally ambiguous cases from the family division. Other set pieces of realism concern a scheme for salt marshes as a defence against coastal flooding, a geologist's apocalyptic vision of the future, and a disenchanted lawyer's account of a gross miscarriage of justice.
McEwan's reproduction of the legal language of Fiona's judgements would suggest he could easily have been a lawyer himself.
    
      Sometimes the writing seems to move above realism into the realm of fantasy: one example is the bedside interview with the dying boy--a beautiful piece of writing. Another is the concert at the Inns of Court, at which Fiona is accompanying a singer colleague, which allows McEwan to show off his musical knowledge.
     Some doubts have been expressed by my partner, Joan, about the ending, which she found very contrived and not convincing. I do not have those doubts.
     And just as a final word: once I started, I kept reading on and off and finished the book in a day, appreciating its reasonable length--221 pages on modestly sized pages.
     


   

"J" by Howard Jacobson

      “J” by Howard Jacobson was shortlisted for the Booker prize, but was beaten by the Flanagan novel.

      John Burnside’s review in The Guardian suggests that this is THE dystopian novel of the 21^st Century, comparable to ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984.’ This prompted me to look closely at the definition of ‘dystopia.’

      

       The OED defines ‘dystopia’ as “An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.” In other words, the opposite of ‘utopia.’ American dictionaries define it differently. Random House, for example, has “a society characterized by human misery, squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” American Heritage uses the same definition but adds ‘deprivation’ and ‘terror.’

       

       The society described in Howard Jacobson’s novel does not, in fact, fit either of these definitions of dystopia. People are not uniformly miserable: they are not hungry: life goes on in what seems to be a somewhat depressed society: and most of the joys of art, music, literature, and of the life of the imagination have disappeared. And in a sort of Stasi way, people are often under observation, and we eventually discover that the two principal characters, Ailinn and Keverne Cohen, have been deliberately brought together and closely observed by some strange agency. It is their weird love story that forms the core of the narration. Chapters are interleaved with brief descriptions of what seem to be historical atrocities.

       I have got my draft and John Burnside’s review a bit mixed up in my cutting and copying. The following paragraph is mostly John Burnside’s—I think—although I believe I added to it.

      

        Undesirable art, music, and books, for example, are "not banned, nothing was banned exactly, simply not played. Encouraged to fall into desuetude, like the word desuetude. Popular taste did what edict and proscription could never have done, and just as, when it came to books, the people chose rags-to-riches memoirs, cookbooks and romances." Jazz has disappeared, because improvisation has "fallen out of fashion"--ballads are the main music; family histories have been erased and all names changed to odd Celtic-Jewish amalgams as a result of Operation Ishmael (from Moby Dick--“Call me Ishmael,”). Entertainment is left to those of Caribbean origin: plumbing is the realm of the Poles. You can only have one landline phone: no mobiles. Book groups have to be licensed.

       

        A slow, careful reading only gradually reveals that a major atrocity occurred in the seemingly distant past, perhaps two or three generations ago. It is always mentioned, in capitals, as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED: there are clearly some atrocity deniers.    It is a difficult read, needing close attention, as you have to give a lot of thought about exactly what has happened (IF it happened) and what is actually happening to the two main protagonists: who are watching them, and why. And what is Keverne Cohen's problem?

       And just to be clear--this is the UK, where even the place names have been changed. St. Michael's Mount is now St. Mordechai's Mount. And the setting of the novel is in Port Reuben--a name substituted for an old celtic name.

        A must read.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

        I have now finished Flanagan’s book ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ and clearly it is a major achievement and certainly worthy of winning the Man Booker Prize. Anyone who admires good writing should read it.

       It does tend to get referred to as the book about the Japanese prison camp, which certainly features centrally and provides the setting for much of the best writing, but one Booker judge characterised the novel as ‘a love story.’ For me, I have to say that I was not that impressed by the early chapters of the love story theme, where the feelings of the protagonist seemed to me to be obsessively over the top—but I suppose that was the intention. I see it more as a biography of the principal character—Dorrigo (why that name?) Evans, and I wonder how much of his life as described in the novel (apart from the prison camp) reflected the life of Flanagan’s father, who was a prisoner of the Japanese and died in his late nineties after the book was published.

       There are some terrific bits of writing that stick in my mind—the thought processes of the Japanese colonel who gets emotional and professional pleasure out of the skill with which he beheads people with his sword: the beating of Darky Gardiner, which is principally seen through the eyes of prisoners who are compelled to watch, and thus the reader is also—like the prisoners—somewhat detached from the cruelty of what is actually happening: and the description of a forest fire near Hobart, which the author had surely experienced and simply had to write a tour de force chapter about, although its relevance in the book may be questionable.

       The emotional developments of the various Japanese who ran the camp—and who should have been prosecuted as war criminals--are also very skillfully crafted; with time, they each believe that what they did was justified--after all, it was for the Emperor; and anyone who let himself be taken prisoner—rather than killing himself—was beneath contempt and deserved what he got…And anyway, they knew they were god men.

       It is a fairly long read at 350 odd pages, and I sometimes got impatient with the speed of its development, as I sometimes do with novels of this length, but you have to persevere: the effort is well-worth it.

Starting Out...

It is November 18, 2014, and I have been trying to construct an e-mail called Book Talk; but I have concluded that I have too much material for an e-mail; much better, it would seem, if I did a blog instead. Recipients of e-mails generally expect them to be short and sweet, and my potential e-mail was getting to be pages long. Better to have shorter pieces from day to day, or book to book, than hanging on until I have three books behind me and then trying to catch up. And in this way, I can do a post for a book or some other themes that interest me.